Sorry that I haven’t been a good correspondent. I am thinking of you, and hoping you are all well. If you want to keep up with my doings, check this page out, or go to www.samaram.com.au, where I am posting lots of stuff about art. You could join Twitter! I am often to be found there as well.

Due to my recent Macbook Mishap (hard-drive died), I have decided to re-visit and re-publish some posts from my early blogs of 2008 (from Cabanandra Dreaming, as an ode to the beauty of backups! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE dear readers, back-up!

Systems Thinking Part 2

Eleanor Rosch distinguishes between two types of knowledge: analytical knowledge (cognitive science) and what she terms “wisdom awareness” or “primary knowing.”

Says Rosch: “The analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences is this: the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs. The human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know: isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner.”

In contrast, “Awareness is said to [be knowing] by means of interconnected wholes (rather than isolated contingent parts) and by means of timeless, direct, presentation (rather than through stored re-presentations). Such knowing is ‘open,’ rather than determinate; and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself. Action from awareness is claimed to be spontaneous, rather than the result of decision making; it is compassionate, since it is based on wholes larger than the self; and it can be shockingly effective.”

In one of my previous posts ( Indigenous Law vs Blunt Tools) I talked about UNDERSTANDING, which I think is something like this ‘wisdom awareness’ that Rosch talks about.

So how does it relate to building? Well, I think that many of the things that we all love in our homes are universal things. For example a sense of warmth, comfort, protection, security, light and etc. So building ‘eco-friendly’ (which owner builders understand because they have learnt it through experience!) such as using passive solar principles, using local labour, sustainable materials, building as a response to the environment, etc, could also be universal thing. BUT, it must be available at the level of ‘wisdom awareness’ or ‘primary thinking’. This cannot come from more legislation.

As Sam Sergi says in my earlier blog

SAM SERGI: I do believe we need parameters to kind of work in with if it’s going to help the environment, because we need to look towards the future and try and economise, yeah, but by the same token, you know, need to have a sense of “this is what I feel I would like to have”.

This sense is the UNDERSTANDING or wisdom awareness that I refer to.

Saturday, 3 May 2008

Anyway here are some photos of recent goings on in Taswegia. Including another visit to Mt Field and caving at Mystery Creek. Cheers.

Search for:

About Herenow Collective

We're about making a difference in the way people work and ultimately, to reduce our consumption of the planet’s resources. We are passionate about collectively creating a sustainable future for our planet.